Trav's Blog

I’m bringing my blog out of retirement for at least one post. It has been almost 2 years since my last post, but I wanted to get my thoughts on the new version of Ubuntu out somewhere, and hopefully start a discussion with other users as well. I was having trouble fitting all this into 140 characters, so here it is

So, people who have been reading my tweets and/or Facebook posts know that Ubuntu and I have a love/hate relationship lately. I have used every version since the very first one, even before it had a name (and was at no-name-yet.com). The past few versions, however, have been disappointing. The Ubuntu derivatives (such as Linux Mint), while often impressive, always left something to be desired. For a few months now, my Linux distribution of choice has been Arch.

That said, even through all the disappointment, I have been trying the Ubuntu releases as they come out, whether I ended up using them or not. There were some show-stopping bugs and gripes in the past few releases– I haven’t enjoyed an Ubuntu release since 2009. I’m pleased to say, however, that 11.04 has impressed me, even as it is still in beta.

There’s one annoying Gnome bug (that affects all Linux distributions, not just Ubuntu) that is still present. The tap-to-click settings for touchpads are messed up– three-finger tapping should right-click but middle-clicks, and two-fingered tapping should middle-click but right-clicks. I have a shell script (which unfortunately doesn’t work when auto-started) that I run upon logging into Gnome to work around this. I was also peeved to find that Gnome 3 still has this bug.

But in plain Gnome, that is about my only complaint. One of my previous problems with Ubuntu is that it felt more and more like customization was going out the window, with so many things that work together and *must* work together. This time though, with Gnome, I feel no need to customize very far. I changed the wallpaper from that horrid purple background, but other than that it is quite nice.

KDE has also come a long way. I never liked Kubuntu’s implementation of KDE. Arch is often touted as the king of KDE, and I’ve been using that exclusively for a while now and the KDE implementation in Kubuntu 11.04 makes me feel right at home. Everything works seamlessly, and like I want it to, just as if I had configured it myself.

The elephant in the room, so to speak, is Unity. I am currently writing this from Unity, in hopes to get to know it better. I have been checking out the development of Unity for a few months now, and it wasn’t until recently that it became usable. There are still quite a few problems that should be worked out before release, but won’t. There just isn’t enough time. I feel it would have been more sensible to offer this as a non-default option for 11.04, and make it default for 11.10, if they so desire.

There’s basically no customization: you can’t move the dock on the left side of the screen, or add /remove much at all from the top bar. Changing the order of  dock entries can be a pain at times. Quite a few non-standard apps don’t cooperate with the menu/title bar changes. This is especially annoying for Google Chrome if you are using Chrome’s titlebar (which saves screen real estate and looks far better). Finding an application in the menu (if you can even call it a menu at this point) is very cumbersome and takes far too many clicks.

All the problems aside, Unity is now very usable. I just don’t think it is ready for prime time yet, and I can’t fathom why this should be the default for all device types. I have it on my netbook and my laptop, and it is handy for the netbook (screen space being all too important) but vanilla Gnome or KDE are far better for the laptop. There are some design decisions and bugs that I have serious problems with, but I’m hoping it grows and improves.

So in closing, I think this is going to be the first version of Ubuntu I keep installed since around 2009. I will probably be hopping between the desktop environments before making a decision on where to stay, but it will probably be KDE, and I can almost guarantee it will not be Unity.

As an afterthought, I should point out that I have also criticized the leadership of both Ubuntu and Gnome for the all too public feud they have been having for a while (but seems to have calmed down lately). I think the criticism to both sides was fair, they are all acting like children, but the start of the feud (from what I can tell, and hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong) was due to Canonical disagreeing with design changes proposed by Gnome for Gnome 3. After trying Gnome 3 using an openSuse-based live cd , I have to say… Canonical had a point. Gnome 3 is an unusable mess at this point. I know it is a new release of a major version with a complete interface overhaul, but there are some glaring usability problems. They suffer from the same problems that Unity does, and then some. Maybe they will come around later, but you may want to steer clear for a while.